Pick yourself up and pull yourself together

Pick yourself up and pull yourself together by Alex Chinneck

Southbank Centre, London19 – 26 February 2015

millimetre’s deft manipulation of concealed steel was the secret behind artist Alex Chinneck’s gravity-defying illusion: a 1-ton Corsa, parked upside down, 4.5 metres off the ground, on a 15-metre wave of tarmac. The collaboration with Vauxhall Motors was situated inside Hungerford Car Park, turning the notion of a parking space on its head.

millmetre created the invisible rolled steel sections, welding ladder truss sections onto three universal columns and cladding the structure in three layers of glued and screwed 6mm grain birch plywood. The car was bolted to the arch and the timber was clad in flexible gesmonite moulds, taken from the tarmac.